“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
– John Keats
See Ray’s art at Lézard Brevard, 2395 Greenville Hwy, Brevard 28712
Ray Holland is a psychotherapist, author, poet and visual artist
living in Horse Shoe, North Carolina.
His art unapologetically feels while the artist explores
what is True and Beautiful.
Heart-drama
Ray Holland has been a professional therapist for decades and was trained to practice experiential deep-emotional work. Such practices were then largely abandoned by the field of psychology, replaced by insurance-driven cognitive-behavioral “skills,” much easier to research and sell in our Name-Brand society. However, he has been practicing so long that those old emotionally focused methods have come back into favor, (re) embraced by the cutting-edge thought leaders and scientists of our day.
“The left hemisphere’s goal is to enable us to manipulate things, whereas the goal
of the right hemisphere is to relate to things and understand them as a whole.”
Lain Mc Gilchrist, The Divided Brain
In his extraordinary books, Mc Gilchrist considers at great length the creeping dominance of the left hemisphere. It has largely taken over our minds, creating much of the damage we see around us and within us. In the history of psychology our left-leaning, grasping, mechanistic way of perceiving, a useful but an inherently delusional aspect of us, has been given many names.
In Ray Holland’s recent book Heart-drama: A Way to Beauty and Truth, and in his therapeutic work, he calls it simply the Abnormal Persona. It shows up—on our experiential stage—in a myriad of disguises, but it is always focused on controlling externals, shaping the world in its image with no real insight or understanding of reality.
The Abnormal Persona taps angry and resentful energies, while it is also interacting with—often it conflicts with or it teams ups with—our Pain and Self-Deception, two other powerful Titans in our nervous system.
The therapeutic work and his visual creations are meant to support standing back from the unconscious push and pulls by externalizing them as characters, as animals or inner personalities, even landscapes, with the goal to gain awareness of them. Once we know what is occurring, we can find strategies to lessen the Heart-drama that brings so much chaos and heartache, so we can better relate to our
lives “as a whole.”
Heart-drama available on Amazon as paperback or ebook: Amazon.com: Heart-Drama: A Way to Beauty and Truth eBook : Holland, Ray
If you are interested in therapy or having him present his therapeutic
approach, contact his business line 828-890-8340.
Visual Art
In many of his paintings, a viewer may first recognize that the surface is uniquely intricate. Against a backdrop of the acrylic foundation on canvas or board, decorative papers are cut, punched, and torn to add texture and color. From a distance the scenes can have a realistic depth, yet up close there is a clear layering of oil paint over paper with unexpected patterns, repetitions, and details.
“What fires together, wires together,” neuroscientists now confirm. Meaning? We need to feel deeply in order to change the self-sabotaging ways we have been programmed to survive in our culture.
Too long we have just forgotten we are mammals, while our self-declared superior “sapien” species has hurried along the 6th Great Extinction period. If there is to be much of a future, humans must resist the emotional-avoiders and narcissists who seek to dominate us. We need to look beneath the surface and remember the True Self: we are the animal born to cherish Beauty; beauty is what we attune to and what enlivens us. We are also innately the hunters of Truth; truth is coming to face what is grounded in lived experience.
Of course, there is an inherent irony that, in these paintings, the foxes, wolves, bears, rabbits, dogs, and birds etc. are frequently encountering each other while embodying the feeling states that allow for healing: mindful, flowing, attuned, and spiritual. If only more human mammals could find our way to these states of mind and heart and make them the state of the world.
We are living in a house
where Beauty shines all the time
because there are intervals when I know how to be with you.
I treasure the simplest mornings when I retrieve the bird feeder from its hanger,
shake the moment out before work, sift the seeds into a pile because I know their tiny bird desires.
And my heart feeds
as the Chickadees, the sparrows
in their excitement
lean over the leaves and the deep spaces
to call each other,
and I can see you;
I can really see who is smiling
in your eyes,
because there are intervals when our love is this unadorned.
A bright Cardinal kneels into the bin
And all around him are clustering birds
Hopping amongst the tree limbs
In motion like a mobile,
as if they are all joined somehow
By the Beauty that shines all the time,
Jostling the stillness
with their perfectly unmasked feather bodies.
Because there are intervals when I know how short life is
And how blessed I am.
Get in Touch
Ray Holland Art
(828)-890-8340
aplacetohealandgrow60@gmail.com
If you would like a bit more musings and reflections, check out the therapy website aplacetohealandgrow.com